0ad A25, released!

by Luis Guzmán | Aug 11, 2021 | GNU/Linux, Libre Software

We are back once again, to comment on the release of 0ad A25.

From a gamer’s point of view, this is a much more stylized version of the past A24, it improves its playability and its visual art in a big way.

From a better order in the movement of large groups of units, to the implementation of new functions such as the launch of “flares”, which reminds us a lot of AoE.

0ad is a visual delight because of its landscapes, detail of objects and units, which is very gratifying to see that level of detail in a creative project of free software and open source.

I do not want to extend myself in praise and compliments, since the game does it very well by itself, from a technical point of view in its installation I have not found many changes on the part of the developers.

The official PPA repository of 0ad still shows no signs of wanting to update the game and even when A24 was kind of a calibration release, so it could be understood that it was not updated to that version, A25 should not be the case in its update process.

However, here are the instructions to compile A25 from Ubuntu 20.04 / Trisquel 10.0

As in the previous version we will rely on the PPA repository of 0ad, to obtain the dependencies for the construction of the binaries,

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E4FA953A
echo "#0ad PPA repository
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/wfg/0ad/ubuntu bionic main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

We install dependencies,

sudo apt-get -y build-dep 0ad
sudo apt-get -y install rustc cmake libfmt-dev

We download the code

git clone --depth 1 --branch A25 https://github.com/0ad/0ad

We start the compilation using all available threads,

cd 0ad/build/workspaces
./update-workspaces.sh -j"$(nproc --all)"
cd gcc
make -j"$(nproc --all)"

If everything goes well, we continue with the test,

cd ../../..
binaries/system/test

As in previous versions, if you get output like this,

Running cxxtest tests (381 tests).............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................OK!

Ready!, to conquer the ancient world

binaries/system/pyrogenesis

0ad A25, play it with friends for better results =)